Fresh Fruits
by Shoichi Aoki (Phaidon)
Fruits, the volume that precedes Fresh Fruits, documented the fashion at Omote-sando, the main street in the Harajuku area of Tokyo. At one time during the ’90s, every Sunday the street was declared a pedestrian haven: all traffic was banned for the day, and Japanese kids started gathering there to flaunt their spectacular and outlandish outfits. Fresh Fruits is the second installment: a collection of photos that captures the final wave at its crest–the weekly street closing was abolished in 1998, and the phenomenon has slowly disappeared.
Each picture in Fresh Fruits showcases an outfit or two, and features a questionnaire with the model about the clothes they’re wearing, their favorite music, current obsession, and “point of fashion.” Entire Vivienne Westwood suits are matched (or gloriously mismatched) with handmade accessories; insights into the point of fashion range from “ice cream vendor” to “pretending to be Hawaiian”; and obsessions range from “making rabbits!” to “strawberry milk” to just plain “sex.” (That one comes from a skinny, sulky Japanese boy in a fur coat on a glittering platinum bicycle) Only rarely does a grimace-inducing photo pop up; for instance, some teenager whose outfit is just an overwrought mess, and who probably got caught up in the fashion battleground at Omote-sando.
One of the most impressive parts of Fresh Fruits is perfectly described by the author: “It was the wearer who superseded the designer to create a new fashion sensibility that was as daring as it was transformative. But above all this fashion was quintessentially Japanese in its innovative mixing of traditional fashion codes and signifiers.” There’s a highly charged, paper-doll element to the scope of Fresh Fruits. As you flip the pages, the interchangeable bodies of Japanese youth appear in a dizzying range of aesthetic signifiers. Full Brit-punk tartan outfits tower alongside life-sized anime humanoids and something that looks like a character from the board game Candyland as Tokyo teenagers toy with the meaning-making elements in fashion. Semiotic play aside, there’s also great pleasure to be had on the surface–a voluminous combination of fabrics, accessories, styles, attitudes, and colors suck you into a detailed, breathtaking, and spellbinding sensory experience.